With the dust settled (bearly) on the FORMULA 1 GRAND PRIX DE MONACO 2013 what was your thoughts on the race? Please let us know why you voted the way you did in the comments section below.
thejudge13
F1: Daily International News roundup, inside whispers and insight together with thoughts and opinion
Plenty of action not enough overtaking but in all an exciting race to watch with plenty of incidents and thankfully nothing too serious and no one seriously injured despite the aggressive racing by Perez !!!
This “race” was an absolute shambles. While I’m very happy with the winner, it cannot mask the fact that we actually didn’t see a race at all. For the entire race cars were doing 1:20 to 1:24 laps and one lap from home Vettel delivers a 1:16 just like that to grab the fastest lap and on top of it gets a ticking off by the mullahs behind the pit wall for “driving too fast”. For almost the entire “race” people were deliberately driving 4-5 seconds slower than possible. That’s utterly ridiculous.
Pirelli should be tarred, feathered and banished in shame. They’re making a mockery of F1. Get the hell rid of them!
Yes, and race cars are always limited by some factor, or combination of factors. At Monaco, traffic makes overtaking nigh on impossible absent a massive delta, so yes everyone will try to pit as little as possible which means managing your race with that in mind. Including tires. There were calls about brakes, Raikkonen’s engine overheated, many factors to be managed. Including races coming up.
FWIW Rosberg could probably have pulled a lap that fast if he chose to, he just didn’t need to prove anything to himself. IMO not a risk worth taking P2 with one to go.
Not to negate Danilo’s comments above which I largely agree with (except laying the blame at Pirelli’s door…), but I find it interesting that this seemed the DULLEST race so far this year – only one stop for most and rather a snooze-fest (with the notable exception of Perez – until accidents spiced it up.
if 4 stops are too many, one is certainly too few.
By the way – if the drivers were REALLY driving two seconds a lap slower than they could just to save tyres, over 78 laps that’s more than two and a half minutes. Is overtaking SO hard at Monaco that a two-, three-, or four-stopper wouldn’t be faster?
Discuss 😉
At Monaco you’d need to be 2,3 seconds faster to get by or employ some steering angle trickery like Force India that allowed Sutil to overtake into Loews hairpin – the highlights of an otherwise dull afternoon btw. No matter how fast your car is, an extra stop is devastating at Monaco, which is why we saw drivers dawdling about like old men in Volvo’s.
I punched the hate button like a madman, when Nico got this team-radio: “Your pace management is good”
pace management!!?? WTF?? Consistency and delta-time runs are something that belongs into historic cars rallys, not the biggest motorcar racing series in the world.
Austin last year had only one stop for most, but the do-or-die fight between Vettel and Hamilton made it exciting. But that was a time when drivers were actually allowed to race.
I was starting to nod away Tim.. and then Massa did us a favour. So here is an idea.. why dont we make the Monaco GP two sprint races? Half race distance then everyone has to line up and start again, but not under safety car. No points until the full race distance completed though…
Even Better, just a series of qualifying events. Ideally in hard to predict conditions.
You backing Bernie’s sprinklers then Matt? 😛
I’ve advocated this kind of idea for some time and did again in the piece I wrote earlier in the week.
You’ve reminded me of a cartoon in the 1973 book Brockbank’s Grand Prix which suggested several ideas to spice up the racing for the forthcoming season, such as having pedestrian crossings, or having oncoming traffic (as “any fool can drive flat-out round a blind bend if they know it’s a one-way street”!). If you ever see a copy, I can highly recommend it, as Brockbank produced many great F1 and motorsport-related cartoons in the ’40’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s, most of them published in Punch magazine, all of them hilarious. And they perfectly illustrate how similar the arguments about spectacle, tyres, and regulations remain across the decades.
Why stop at sprinklers, we could have caltraps to test the puncture resistance of Pirelli’s steel belted tyres!! – and instant moveable barriers in case Perez decides to behave himself next time and we need some extra excitement?!
Do I detect a touch of sarcasm Ted 🙂
Seriously, we can’t hold an uninterrupted race in Monaco anymore. Safety cars and Red Flags are here to stay.
This means teams will adopt conservative approaches to the race – a wait and see attitude.
If Raikkonen could travel at 2s a lap quicker than everyone else on fresh rubber, why didn’t RB try and win the race? Answer: They just wanted to finish ahead of Alonso. So they won’t race flat out regardless of tyres if the percentage opportunity is not to do so.
2 Qualifying sessions and two Sprint races are the future for this out of date track layout. IMHO
Or we could go back to a “super-sprint” type qualifying competition and just have each car against the clock, with no racing, seeing we cannot get a clean race on this track? I love the intense atmosphere of Sprint/Hillclimb competitions – rather like “the smell of napalm in the morning”!
Oi’ll give it 5 – a bit of a yawn fest and very difficult to get excited with the poorly produced BBC highlights programme, until the do or die efforts of a few of the drivers! Very little in-car filming shown on BBC. Cannot understand why they take all the usual presenters and do not prepare an after race review programme using their own cameras, as they do when at live venues. I saw a news item which said that BT Sport will have exclusive rights to MotoGP from 2014 and I wonder what the fate of F1 will be on free to view in the future?
I almost fell asleep watching Barcelona. Monaco had my full attention. The cars still look super quick on the swimming pool entry camera shot. I thought Sutil and Perez drove great races. Very happy for Nico who’s stock must be rising exponentially. So many dismissed him last year when he was beating a Schumacher who was supposedly past his prime. Hamilton must be losing some sleep at night wondering how he will get on top of Nico. Can’t wait for Montreal